Nation: Hurricane Aftermath: To Survive And Protect

September 11, 2005|By Los Angeles Times

NEW ORLEANS — After Katrina, 26 police officers began living with one another.

In a deserted subdivision, past mobile homes blown inside out and power poles snapped in two, there is an unassuming home with a two-car garage, porcelain ducks on the dining table and a swing set in the backyard.

The 26 men and women inside sleep next to their guns, scrounge for food, rely on handouts for things like toilet paper and steal cars.

Then they get up in the morning and try to save the city.

This is what it's come to for the New Orleans Police Department, where authorities estimated last week that 70 percent of the city's 1,700 officers are now homeless.

The Police Department has been decimated by Hurricane Katrina. Two officers have put their guns in their mouths and killed themselves. More than 200 have quit. About 500 are unaccounted for. The rest have fought with looters, run out of ammunition, fended off criticism of their response to the storm and been knocked off rescue boats into the fetid stew that covers more than half the city.

For more than a week, they have dealt with personal tragedies no different than anyone else's here -- apartments that are under water, parents who are missing, children being shuttled from one shelter to the next.

Two dozen of them found their way to the home of Lt. David M. Benelli, 55, commander of the city's sex-crimes unit, and the woman he calls his child bride -- Sgt. Becky Benelli, 42, the assistant commander of the crime lab. The Benellis are cops to the core; they met at a traffic fatality and fell in love.

The officers at "Camp Benelli" reflect the diversity of the department: 21 men and five women, black and white, 33-year veterans and patrol cops with six months under their belts. They have more than 300 years of combined service on the force.

And every morning, they find the strength to go to work.

Glenn Madison, 47, a firearms instructor, is a 22-year veteran of the force. His story is typical of the officers staying at Camp Benelli.

His three children evacuated before the storm, and he has barely spoken with them since. His home is under water in New Orleans East, a district on the northeast side. Two nights ago, he made his way back to Camp Benelli, only to hear that a bus carrying evacuees from a nursing home had been hijacked west of the city.

"Your daddy was on there," one of his colleagues said.

Madison's father, an 83-year-old Alzheimer's patient, had been left with the others on the side of the road. After a frantic night on his cell phone, as the signal died again and again, Madison learned that his father had been picked up by another bus and was safe. He tried to sleep for a couple of hours, then hit the streets again.

"It definitely isn't for the pay," he said. "Believe it or not, this is where we live. New Orleans is our home. And this is our job."

Like it did for so many in New Orleans, the plight of the officers at Camp Benelli began not so much with the hurricane itself, but with the water that began creeping into the city the next day.

Most of the officers were bunking at the crime lab, in the central business district, when the hurricane hit Monday, Aug. 29. The water starting rising around the building, then came in the front doors by Tuesday morning. The officers raced to the main police compound on South Broad Avenue, but the water kept rising.

Madison had hauled his 20-foot-long fishing boat into town just in case and parked it near City Hall. But without any tools, officers couldn't get it off the trailer -- so they roared into the flooded streets with the trailer still attached to the hull. The water was so deep that they didn't hit anything. They picked up everyone left at the police compound and fled for a hotel.

They were there for two days.

"Then the manager came by and said he was leaving," said Capt. R.R. Duryea, commander of the crime lab. "He told us, 'There is no help coming to you.' "

They had no place to go, no police headquarters, no operating radios.

Meanwhile, the Benellis had made their way to the Algiers section of New Orleans -- across the Mississippi River and about seven miles from downtown -- to check on their house. That stretch of the West Bank, as it's known, fared better than almost any other part of the metropolitan region. But even there, as the Benellis drove in, they saw towering pine trees that had collapsed on houses, crushing roofs.

"I didn't lose a shingle," David Benelli said.

Friday, Becky Benelli discovered that they had running water, a rare commodity in New Orleans these days.

The Benellis decided to set up camp for their stranded colleagues. But the officers' squad cars were under water, and they had no way to get to the Benellis' house. So they set up a checkpoint in downtown New Orleans. They spent all night stopping every car that went through.

"Every car that was stolen, we stole it back," Duryea said. "That became our fleet."

There were 24 officers who needed a place to stay, and even with four bedrooms at the Benelli house, they needed more space. So David Benelli called his neighbor John Walters.

The officers now live like the Swiss Family Robinson. There are people assigned to take out the trash -- as far away as possible, since it will not be picked up anytime soon -- and people assigned to wash the towels once a day.

There are occasional treats that people drop off -- chocolate, a whole chicken that the officers threw on the grill, a 2003 Robert Mondavi Chardonnay that was nestled in a pile of donated ice Tuesday.

"Mostly, though, they just need a place to lie down and sleep," David Benelli said. *